Friday, December 31, 2010

Some people say 2011 will be the year Android is going to explode, but for AppBrain, 2010 was already a huge explosion! We launched the first version of AppBrain back in February. We got overwhelmed by all your positive feedback and the amazing growth in website traffic and number of downloads of the AppBrain app.

Since the launch in February the number of apps in the Android Market grew from 25,000 to 130,000 at the end of December 2010.We are very proud you are using our service to discover the great apps within this huge collection, and you made us the leading website to discover Android apps. We will keep working hard on your feature requests and on making AppBrain even better in the coming year!

Now we would like to have a look back and share some interesting statistics we gathered over the year.

Most popular Android search terms in 2010

What are the most searched-for apps? The following table shows the top 10 search terms on AppBrain.com over the whole year:

Half of these search terms are for very popular Android apps. It is very interesting to see that the generic search terms are for apps which are focused on customizing the Android phone, eg live wallpaper, widget and launcher.

Also the search for battery shows that there is huge interest in knowing more about the state of the battery and in tools to extend the battery life time.

The success of Angry Birds is amazing, especially considering that “Angry Birds Seasons” just didn’t make it into the top 10 as it was placed at 11.

Most popular Android phones in 2010

The 10 most popular Android devices among all the AppBrain users in 2010 were:

It is great to see that the most popular phones are quite powerful and run Android 2.1 or higher. This allows to develop more powerful apps for the users and less extra effort for the developers to support outdated platform versions.

Hopefully there will be Gingerbread, dual core, and tablet devices in this list next year :)

We wish you a happy new year and hope that 2011 will be another great year for Android!

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Since last February, we have been optimizing the app discovery experience on Android with the AppBrain website and the AppBrain Android app. We think Google has done an excellent job in creating the Android operating system; it is both user-friendly and developer-friendly. However, as both user and developer we found that the Android market is lacking in many places, which is why we chose to create AppBrain.

A particularly big annoyance is the overflow of incoming 'spam' apps in the Android market. We tackled this problem on AppBrain a long time ago by hiding these bad apps from most users' eyes, which greatly improved the app browsing experience. However, we never fully remove these bad apps from our site to still allow users to see them if they really want to.

Even though the Android Market Content Policies do not allow apps with sexually explicit material, there are plenty of such apps available in the market. Ironically we also got notified by the Google AdSense team that it's not allowed to show ads next to information about these apps, which are present on their own Google Android market.
As with the spam apps we will not censor or remove these apps from our site, but instead we implemented an advanced 'mature content' filter on top of our already existing spam filter.
The new 'mature content' filter warns users when entering a page which shows an app with sexually explicit content. (Those apps which should not be in the Android Market according to the Android Market Content Policies):

We launched this feature on the AppBrain website today, and it will be also available in the AppBrain app in the next update!

We hope this will make it even easier for you to find the good apps you want without being bothered by spam and porn.

Filter support for apps that support App2SD. We have heard many requests of people with almost full phone storage that they want to be able to filter apps that can be stored on the SD card. In the filter section on the left of browse pages, or on the top of search pages this is now available.

Note that due to technical limitations, we cannot have perfect App2SD information for very new or unpopular apps. Therefore we might occasionally miss an application, but all popular and interesting applications should be available for you to search!

These features will come to the AppBrain application soon, so stay tuned!